Grizzled Unix vet Paul Venezia tips his cap to the Windows Server crew, suggesting that the lessons of Unix history have not been lost on Microsoft -- and that's one reason why Windows Server has become so complex. 'The Windows Server of today has more in common with Unix than many people want to admit. The upside: more stable servers, greater scope of services, better adherence to standards, and Microsoft's newfound willingness to work with its competition. The downside is that Windows has become more complex than Unix from a management and administration point of view,' Venezia writes, even if he still sees some Windows admin practices as prime examples of how not to administer servers.

"Given enough time and money, Microsoft will eventually invent UNIX....and call it innovative." - me.

And I've been saying this for years
Microsoft has always tried to build the software people needed at the time. They didn't pretend to have perfected the OS in 1970.

And by in large they succeeded.

That meant, heavy tie in with the graphics back when GUI speed was important on low end computers.
That meant DOS integration with further versions of Windows.
That meant low/no security in desktop versions to make it consumer friendly back when most home computers were not networked or connected to the internet.

And as the world's needs increased and computer horse power rose, they put many things in... always trying to maintain backwards compatibility.

I remember having to write a utility program to run on some lab computer at university. They had old computers that they wanted to use to connect to some oscilloscopes. We're talking 386s and 486s. I did in QT, but I couldn't find a usable version of Linux that ran well on those machines. The GUIs were ghastly slow. Win95 though, did the trick.

If you want to wonder why Windows did so well as opposed to Unixy systems. It is reasons like this. They got things to work. Meanwhile, a Unix person would have probably said... we can only get it to run this fast due to X windoww, message passing...blah blah.

There's an article somewhere I read about MS actually writing custom memory code to handle bad software in games like SimCity so it wouldn't crash.

I have little doubt the folks at MS could have done things like Unix. They have always had many technically smart people there. Yet, they chose to do their own thing to make their product succeed by designing it for users at the time and getting their own API for lock-in.

I just don't buy the attitude that MS was 'stupid' and couldn't figure out how to build an OS. Eventually they'll learn all the lessons and become a Unix.

Rather, I think they knew all about Unix. They saw that it didn't fit the current customer needs nor their own business model, so they did something else.

They've been very successful at it. And now as the world moves towards servers, thin clients... MS is once again adapting... providing the 'server' like behaviors that have been in Unix since day one.

Who knows if they'll succeed or if their old baggage is just too much.

I just don't buy the attitude that MS was 'stupid' and couldn't figure out how to build an OS.

Until recently, MS did not know how the Windows Kernel actually worked, according to Windows Kernel expert Russonivich. No one knew what was going on inside the Windows Kernel. I dont know if this is true, still, but Russonivich said MS was working on this 2010, to hope to be finished 2011. I dont know if anyone yet knows what is going on in the Windows kernel. It is a total mystery to everybody. The Windows kernel is huge, maybe 100MB or so, a black hole. Unix kernels are typically a couple of MB.

Regarding sim city, yes MS worked hard to keep backwards compatibility, but failed big. For every new release of Windows, there is a huge list of software that does not work with the latest windows and need to be rewritten. Just look at MS own homepage, there usually is a list of software that does not work with the latest Windows.

So, many say Windows is a mess. And is not fit for anything demanding and large Enterprise stuff. There is a reason London Stock Exchange threw out their Stock system (running on Windows) and installed Linux instead.